I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  He had a solitary lunch, late, after the lunch crowd had left, across from the Motion Picture Association of America on I street at BLT Steak, a quiet, sleek new beef house in town. He chose it because it was out of the way, a good seven blocks from the bureau and from the Post, and nine blocks in another direction from the National Press Building, so it was unlikely he’d run into any journos there. And he was right: nobody he knew entered, and he spent the time sipping a nice midrange merlot while eating his steak salad and reading his own paper, the Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Boston Globe, to assure himself that nobody else had anything, that he was out front, that the scoop was his. Tomorrow they’d catch up, and he knew right now that in various newsrooms around town, the scramble was on.

  He paid, left the papers, ambled out and down the street toward his shop, enjoying every second, every atom, every nanophenomenon, every twitch of unmeasurable black energy that comprised the wonder of his life until at last he reached the lobby of his own building.

  “There’s the champ!”

  It was that hoary old legend Jack Sims, looking like he’d just stepped out of a confab with FDR himself, all tweeds and oxford cloth, with that square, ruddy, Washington face. Jack, on his way out for the late lunch or an early martini, still wore a belted, buckled Burberry trenchcoat foreign correspondent style, and with a fedora low over his eyes looked like Mitchum in a film noir, but he had the gravitas to bring it off and seemed authentic in the role, not affected.

  “You know,” he said in his booming voice, “at my age, my only pleasure is watching one of you young kids kick ass and take no goddamn prisoners. Congrats, Dave. You ought to be so goddamn proud!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sims,” he said modestly, not even bothering to correct the old guy for calling him Dave, which he hated. It was his ambition to be admired by all the players in the office, no matter the generation, not just his immediate peers.

  “Go get ’em, Tiger,” said the old legend, eyes twinkling, with a last clap on the shoulder.

  David rode the elevator in silence, aware that everyone in it realized from the Sims greeting that he was somebody special.

  Yet when he got to the office, there was a different vibe ahum in the air than the one he expected. He hung his coat, slid down the aisles between the desks, and was aware of just some kind of . . . difference. Usually he felt love, hatred, admiration, begrudging respect, a whole palette of emotions. Today it was, hmm, what? Embarrassment? Shame? Hostility, even anger? What was this all about? It seemed that people squirmed not to make eye contact, that his appearance carried with it the power of silence. All the office chitchat dried up; the place went silent.

  What could that—Was it—Why was—All very strange. He looked, and backlit against his window, Mel the bureau chief was huddled in conference with some others, and they spoke tensely, even urgently. His secretary was even in there with him.

  David didn’t like the feeling.

  He got to his desk, sat down.

  Everything seemed the same, everything seemed fine. So what was the big deal? Maybe it was just his nerves.

  He looked at his watch. It was 3:50, ten until the 4 p.m. news meeting. Just enough time to get the lay of the land.

  He clicked on his computer, waited for it to warm up just like a fifties TV, until the code prompt came on and warned him he had to change codes in nine days but he could do it now if he wanted, and he didn’t, and he waited till his icons came on, little cartoony emblems against the field of deep blue, and he decided to skip the Net—Drudge, Huffington, Power Line, TNR, NRO, and the others—and instead moused straight to Lotus Notes, double-clicked, waited again until the e-mail index came up, checked to see how many he’d gotten, good Lord, it was over 200 and—

  Wait, it wasn’t over 200.

  He looked carefully.

  It was over 8,000.

  8,456!

  David felt his respiratory system ice over in that moment; it just solidified into something heavy with cold and death, immovable and gargantuan, something not him.

  He flicked away from the page to refresh it, and when it came back, the e-mail count was up to 8,761.

  He looked around, convinced that everyone in the office was staring at him but would make no eye contact, as if his colleagues were turning away exactly as his eyes rose to meet theirs.

  That many e-mails could mean but one thing: the Big Mistake.

  He glanced at the displayed topic lines of the e-mails in the column that ran the length of the screen.

  ASSHOLE

  Times commie

  ignoramus

  Should have called NRA

  Fool

  what about seven-day waiting period for YOU!

  Can’t tell Winchester from Rem

  Not a PSR, clown

  DUH

  And on and on it went.

  He picked one that seemed less incendiary than the others, its topic line reading “Visual vocabulary insufficient.” At least this guy might understand punctuation and capitalization.

  Dear Mr. Banjax,

  I suppose by now you have been notified you ran a four-column photograph on the front of your newspaper claiming that you had a picture of a crooked FBI agent firing an FN PSR at the FN range in 2006, when what he is actually holding is a Remington VTR 700, a model not introduced until late 2008. You must also realize that the photograph completely invalidates the premise of your story and your investigation, reveals itself to be a fraud, and suggests that the integrity of the Times has been tarnished beyond recovery. All in all, a smashing performance. Congratulations! You couldn’t have done more harm to your cause if you actually TRIED to harm your cause.

  This represents a distressing tendency on the part of Mainstream Media. You all are so opinionated on gun matters, gun policies, gun politics, yet you lack even the most fundamental gun knowledge to buttress your implicit claims of expertise. Quite the opposite, you oh so frequently expose your woeful ignorance and laughable grasp of reality. But even by that standard, this morning’s blooper is quite spectacular.

  You represent the media assumption that a gun is just a gun. Any gun is any other gun and therefore you of the enlightened, educated ironic classes needn’t trouble yourself with actual facts about it. The facts don’t matter, only something you’re sure you see, called “the truth.” But if there are no facts, there is no truth. It’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as “something with a mistake in it.”

  You idiot. You were incapable of looking at one rifle and distinguishing its differences from another rifle. It’s not rocket science, chum. Thus you publish a picture misidentified that literally millions of people—not all redneck neanderthals listenin’ to CW n’ drinkin’ moonshine in trailer parks, neither, Snuffy—will see through in a second.

  The FN PSR is a refined version of the Winchester Model 70 and still bears the hallmarks of that VERY FAMOUS weapon. The most obvious of these is the trigger guard; the Winchester designers of the early 30s who created that piece of metallic (later alloy) genius had a sense of streamline and grace and they managed to come up with a classic interpretation of the oval. That Winchester oval is part of the visual vocabulary of our times, and any hunter recognizes it instantaneously; it carries with it a trace of art moderne, reflecting the fashions of the period of its creation, and, serendipitously or not, it was so slick and eye-appealing and perfectly scaled and brilliantly machined and blued that even now, over 70 years later, its inheritors in South Carolina can’t bear to part with it. That is why all the new FN rifles bear approximations of it, and any rifle claiming to be FN bolt action would feature such an emblem. The rifle you identify as an FN SPR does not.

  It contains another equally vivid symbol of an American classic. Remington had a different, though just as distinctive, interpretation of the trigger guard. They knew that their rifle, the Model 700, had to have an immediately apparent visual signature that marked its difference f
rom their main competition, the 70 (do you get the 70/700 dynamic?). They were coming into the market 30-odd years later (1962) and at that time, the Model 70 was the baseline, but they saw an opening because they knew that Winchester was planning an upgrade that would ease manufacture but coarsen the product. So they had to deliver something distinctive. Their trigger guard has a kind of bow to it, an expansive exaggeration that takes it out of the oval, opens it up, out, and downward (some say the function is to allow a gloved finger easier access to the trigger), but again with a harmony and grace that is instantly recognizable to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about firearms.

  Evidently, you and your confreres at the Times missed this OBVIOUS distinction, as you missed several other unique hallmarks of the VTR that make it all but impossible to confuse with the PSR.

  I could go on to various differences in the nuance of stock and bolt design. I could point out that the scope on the rifle is a Leupold 9X and unlikely to possess the refinement for the kind of shooting (less than MOA at 300 yards) the picture and the story attribute to Mr. Memphis and the “PSR.”

  But you get the point: all in all, pathetic, ignorant, transparent. Quite ugly. You think we’re so stupid, while you’re the one who’s stupid. You should be ashamed.

  Sincerely,

  Neanderthal P. Country-Music Redneck

  3d Trailer on Right

  Passel O’ Toads, NC

  aka

  Lawrence M. Fisher, MD, PhD

  Director of Oncology

  Methodist Hospital

  Kansas City, MO

  Banjax realized he had been had. He had been faked and ruined and he’d walked right into it.

  “David?”

  It was the bureau chief’s secretary.

  “David, Mel would like to see you.”

  “Well, I—”

  “David, right away,” she said in a voice that communicated the secret meaning David, right away.

  44

  Swagger lay in darkness, too focused to sleep. He was curled on the cot, facing the wall under a thin blanket, aware of the TV camera in the corner of the dark room, its red eye signaling its activity. He waited for time to pass, for his torturers to select a guard, then bed down for the night.

  His wrists were bound together by the tough plastic of the flex-cuff, impervious to most blades; it took a pair of clippers and a great deal of force to cut through them. Thus, by the configuration of wrist on wrist, his fingers were closely intertwined. With the fingers of his right hand, he went to his index finger, left hand, and began to carefully peel the Band-aid around the base of the finger—“Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” It was a process made more arduous by its taking place behind him, in the dark, and inside out, with the left to the right and the right to the left, with numb, swollen fingers. But by picking at the edge of the Band-aid, he got it loosened, and by stretching, sliding, manipulating with great focus and energy, he got the Band-aid removed from the base of the finger. There, buried in scab from the skin-cutting tightness with which it had been wound about the finger, a few inches of hard cutting wire used in certain surgical applications rested, coiled tightly. He got the coil off the finger, ran it through his hands to open it and clean off the dried blood, then—again straining at the awkward angles, the stretch of joint, the numbness in his fingertips—he looped the cutting wire over the plastic of the flex-cuff, caught an end in thumb and forefinger of each hand, and began to saw.

  It was not easy. He felt the sweat rising, slicking his body in the dark little chamber, and he tried to lie quietly, as a man asleep might lie. Meanwhile, the wire would not bite into the plastic and kept slipping. It would snake out of one hand and was tense with inbred circularity, having been wrapped around his finger for such a long time. He focused everything he had on the ordeal, trying to get his fingers to obey, trying to get the cutting wire to bite into the plastic, trying to hold it taut, trying to keep his whole body still for whoever was watching the television monitor, and it seemed for the longest, the most frustrating time not to be happening, it was not happening goddamnit to hell it was not happening he could not get the wire to catch to—

  And then it happened. Why then and not a minute earlier or a minute later he’d never know. Somehow he scored enough into the flex-cuff for the wire to catch and bite, found some leverage in his hands (though they cramped as if being crushed in vices) and, emboldened by his tiny taste of success, began to saw away. On that surge of energy, he got the flex-cuffs cut in less than twenty minutes.

  The trick then was not to give in to the temptation to throw out and stretch his cramped arms, to flex and satisfy his tightened fingers, to rub his raw wrists. He lay still, breathing, waiting.

  Time passed.

  No one rushed in, beat him senseless, and clapped the iron manacles about his limbs.

  He squirmed, turned, and still keeping his hands, though now free, behind his back, twisted downward and got the wire looped over the flex-cuffs about his ankles. With free hands, he had better leverage this time and was able to wrap the wire about his fingers instead of pinching it between them; he was done in five minutes.

  He flicked his ankles, and each shoelace in his left hiking boot presented itself to him, as if specially weighted. It was weighted; from each he withdrew a two-inch-long piece of titanium needle, extremely strong and unbendable, a millimeter wide. Again, he waited for the sound of footsteps, the crash of the door opening, the arrival of the Irish goons with fists and truncheons to beat him to pulp for his audacity. Nothing happened.

  Now, tricky. Was the fellow on the monitor asleep? Was he just drowsing? Was he watching an episode of Star Trek on TV or jerking off to an old copy of Juggs? Or was he enjoying Swagger’s struggle and letting it build in hope until it was time to crush it?

  Swagger’s hard combat mind banished doubt and speculation. No purpose was served, except to slow his directness, and he needed speed, decisiveness, surprise for what lay ahead.

  Easily, he slid off the cot, coming to rest on the floor. He was aware of the red light as if it were a red eye, a dragon’s eye, staring at him. But he pressed on, snaking his way across the dark floor to the door, where he slid upward, leaning against the hard metal, and found the key hole. He probed, a pick in the fingers of each hand. The job required delicacy, and after thirty-six hours of bound torture, he had none; his fingers felt like stone, when they weren’t atremble like the wings of a butterfly. The process seemed to devour time. It seemed hours, as he probed, felt the give of levers inside, the weight of tumblers, the dense cylinder that was the core of the lock, whose flanges had to be manipulated properly, while he held a spring down by pressing hard against it with strength he no longer had. Hours passed, then days and nights, then months. Somehow the years changed, and decades later, the door at last yielded, not with a click but with a whisper. He eased it open, stepped into the well-lit hallway, blinked for focus and clarity, looked each way for a weapon, saw none. He did exactly what he’d done earlier when he’d first entered the house, but he did it more artfully this time, using the sniper’s gift for silent movement, the sniper’s patience for goals reached surely but without rushing, and he came at last to the steps and then to the doorway atop the steps, and he slid through, hearing heavy snoring. His trip took him through the kitchen; he quietly pulled a drawer, then another, and finally a third until he located a butcher’s crude blade with enough point and length to reach blood-bearing organs in a single cut.

  He eased around a corner into the security office and there saw on a screen his own empty cot and the door of his own cell half ajar. Alas, no one was awake to notice, for Ginger, the smartest of the Irishmen, lay sound asleep in a chair, his feet up on a desk under the TV monitor. No time for deliberation now, as Swagger’s trembly, weakened muscles were pumped by the pressure of adrenaline foaming into his bloodstream, and in three swift steps he was upon Ginger, had the man’s neck wrapped in the crook of his elbow, securing it, and with the other han
d, drove the knife point into the delicate skin of the neck just tenths of an inch from the river of red blood known as the carotid.

  “Wake up, you Irish fuck,” he said sharply, jerking on the neck as if to break it, for that was another of his options, given the leverage he had attained.

  “Ggggg—kkk,” was all his crushed passages allowed Ginger to mutter.

  “You listen to me, I’d just as soon cut you open”—he put pressure so that the tip of the butcher’s tool sank another tenth of an inch or so into skin entirely too fragile to offer it anything of an impediment—“and watch you bleed dry on the floor, but what’s going to happen is I’m going to roll you to the vault just like this and you’re going to open it. And if you pretend you don’t know the combination, I’m cutting your carotid clean through and you die vomiting blood and shitting and pissing, while I go upstairs and get myself another Irish artery to split. I will kill all night if I have to. I’m only letting you live because I want some dough, and you’re the messenger.”